


Take Your Secrets to the Beyond

by astudyinpanda



Category: Captain Marvel (2019), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Don't copy to another site, F/M, Imprisonment, Interrogation, Kree (Marvel), Skrull(s), Spoilers, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-16
Updated: 2019-03-16
Packaged: 2019-11-19 07:01:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18132464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astudyinpanda/pseuds/astudyinpanda
Summary: Welding a bit of Talos's comic backstory onto the MCU: The Kree accept Talos's surrender during the standoff in the lab, but they never capture Skrulls alive.





	Take Your Secrets to the Beyond

“They're obviously not soldiers." The Kree who Talos faced in Mar-Vel's lab didn't even blink. He pressed on. "Let them go. You can have me."

He didn't expect them to. The best he could hope for was to give the rest of the Skrulls time to find cover. Balanced on his toes, he watched the Kree weapons, preparing to jump in front of Soren and the little one when the shooting started. It'd be a good end to this standoff. Maybe the easiest one, too. That way, he wouldn't have to watch them die.

But the yellow-eyed Kree, the leader, nodded. The Kree guns swung away from the others to point at Talos. He turned to get one last look past Vers -- no, Carol now -- at his family. Soren's face was a hard mask hiding fury and fear. The little one's eyes were so wide. Really, Talos had only met his daughter today. For a child, six years was an eternity. Now she was losing him for good.

Nothing the Kree locked Talos up with could hold him for long. The final ritual he'd ever perform would see to that.

The Kree must've known it too. Instead of the confinement Talos had expected, a soldier stuck him in the neck with something, right there in the lab. Heat flared briefly at the injection site. Darkness rolled over him while Carol's fading voice asked, "What are you doing to him?"

 

 

It'd been a while since Talos had last impersonated a Kree, and he'd forgotten how hot they liked their environment. Something else felt wrong, too. The air was... Electric, like a laser blast had just flashed past his face. Talos opened his eyes.

He sat alone in a closet-sized cell. The chair he was fastened to fit his true form well enough, but he'd soon fix that. Harsh white light shone down on him from a ceiling fixture. A red force field glowed in the doorway, obscuring whatever lay beyond it. The floor beneath his boots vibrated slightly, like a ship in flight. He had no idea where it was going. It didn't matter.

Talos said the prayers all Skrulls knew, accepting the end of his fight for his people, anticipating the peace of the Beyond. He wished his family and brothers in arms all the luck and protection the universe would grant them. And then it was time. He'd given Soren and their daughter the best chance at survival he could. Now all that was left was to unravel himself at the base level, to disintegrate his physical form so that no one could learn his people's secrets.

It took him long, silent seconds to realize that nothing was happening.

Something was wrong. What'd they stick him with in Mar-Vel's lab? Was it the energy in the air? Talos concentrated. His skin tightened around the stress of trying and failing to shift. It'd been years since he'd felt that. Even when he was almost too tired to breathe, at least part of himself would change.

This shouldn't be possible. The Kree had trapped him in the shape that left him most vulnerable. Everyone on this ship knew who and what he was, but being forced into this form still terrified him. He couldn't complete the ritual. He couldn't die with his honor intact. And he couldn't impersonate one of the Kree, which might've at least given him an opportunity at escape.

He'd shut his eyes, head bowed as he sought leverage over the panic and despair filling his lungs and clouding his mind. A sound somewhere in front of him made him open his eyes again. Beyond the red force field over the cell door, a yellow-eyed Kree leaned on a wall with his arms crossed, watching Talos. It was the leader who'd accepted Talos's surrender. "Having trouble with your shapeshifting trick, Skrull?" The Kree's smirk was an infuriating outline through the force field. "I've heard performance issues happen to everybody."

"What did you do?" Talos's question rumbled, low and quaking with hate, through the space between them.

"We got tired of cleaning up piles of gunk when we take Skrull prisoners, so we're experimenting." The Kree leader's smirk widened. Talos had worked so damned hard to perfect his ability. It'd saved his life time and again. It'd kept him safe and sane through so many dangerous days and horrible nights, and now this Kree who'd taken it from him was _grinning_ about it. It made him sick. "The drug's working so far, isn't it?" the Kree said. "Otherwise, you'd have changed into a prettier form by now."

"What, like yours? I can do better." So whatever they'd injected Talos with had done this to him. Well, drugs wore off. He tested the straps attaching his forearms and ankles to the chair. They didn't move, and his arms stayed the same size and shape no matter how hard he willed them otherwise. "Where are we going?" The Kree had taken Talos's weapons and abilities, but they'd want him to talk. Maybe there was an opportunity in that.

The Kree commander ignored the question and activated a communicator in his uniform sleeve. "Send a crew down to dose him again. He's awake."

Talos spread his fingers, palms up as far as they could be in this position. "Yeah, I'm a real big threat like this. Wise to pile on the chemical security."

The disdainful look his comment earned was satisfying, at least. "You only have to last long enough to meet the Supreme Intelligence. After that, you can liquefy yourself however you want."

If only Talos could somehow survived that encounter without giving all his secrets away. The Kree's Supreme Intelligence ran their whole civilization. Any information about the intelligence might save Skrull lives. But if the Kree were taking him to their leader, then they didn't think he could hurt it. There was a good chance anything he knew would be theirs. He couldn't risk betraying his people, for intel or anything else.

Four Kree soldiers stopped in front of the commander to salute. Talos studied the gesture in case he got an opportunity to use it later. They used the tech in their gloves to drop the force field, then stepped in to give Talos another dose of whatever kept him stuck in his natural form. Like before, the needle pierced his skin, and after the localized heat... Darkness.

 

 

Wherever the Kree took Talos when they left the ship, the air was as warm as every other Kree habitat. The blindfold over his eyes and the white noise blaring from a device over his ears blocked out everything else. Scents of chemicals, oil, and ozone from what he guessed was a ship hangar shifted to artificially circulated air, with a hard, flat surface underfoot. He'd gathered at least two Krees' forms while they were binding his hands in front of him, but he couldn't even tell if he'd gotten a good enough to genetic profile to do a full imitation. Whether he had or he hadn't, it didn't matter. He was still trapped in his original form.

Every step took him closer to an ultimate failure, of himself and of his people. He knew so much about the strategies his people used to avoid the Kree. He knew every hidden harbor, every interrogation method, names and contact protocols for every other Skrull general. And his family, who he'd worked so hard to keep hidden, would be in danger again. The Kree would learn what the people he'd left behind meant to him. It was the most personal, and the most dangerous, secret he kept.

While the environment still smelled of starships, he broke right and ran. After two steps, the Kree knocked him down with some kind of energy. The buzzing energy pressed him against the floor until his damnably solid bones creaked and his skull ached with it. When it became obvious they were going to keep him down until he stopped fighting, he laid still, groaning under the pressure that held him on the floor. When the energy's pressure disappeared, none of them helped him stand.

He climbed awkwardly to his feet with his bound hands outstretched for balance. "Can't blame me for trying," he said. The device over his ears kept him from hearing their response, but something hard shoved him in the small of his back until he staggered forward and started walking.

The air changed. The new area felt larger, even, than the hangar had. This time when he ran, the Kree put him down fast, with fists and hands, face-first onto a textured metal surface with at least one entire Kree on top of him. His teeth tore into the inside of his lip. His mouth filled with blood. Maybe he could get the Kree to kill him. But they held him down until the needle bit into his neck. That was it. He'd lost his chance.

 

 

When the Kree pulled the blindfold from Talos's eyes and took the device off his ears, he lay in a small, dimly lit room. It took him a couple tries to stand. His balance felt off, probably thanks to whatever he'd been injected with. Who knew what else it was doing to his insides.

The same commander that'd captured him was messing with a console built into the wall. Before Talos could get a look at what that was, one of the other Kree kicked him in the legs. He fell hard, both knees thudding on the floor, and he clenched his teeth on a pained sound that these bastards didn't need to hear.

Every nerve screamed at him to get up and run. There was no point, though. The Kree would stop him, either with their energy weapons or by main force. Maybe if he...

Blue-silver strands rose from the floor and surrounded Talos. "What is this?" He was grateful that his fear sounded more like anger. He'd like to retain what dignity he had left.

"This is how the supreme intelligence communicates." The commander was grinning at him. The Kree all were, as the strands wrapped around Talos, binding his arms against his ribs, pulling him toward the floor, keeping him on his knees. Typical Kree arrogance.

"Has it ever talked to a Skrull before?" Talos pushed against the strands, but they remained unyielding as ever. They wound their way up his sides, over his shoulders, toward his head. "Our physiology's a bit different from yours, if you haven't noticed." Maybe he'd get lucky and these things would tear his brain apart, destroying all the secrets inside. It wasn't the way he should've gone to the Beyond, but it'd do.

The Kree commander didn't look concerned about what the strands of light might do to Talos's head. "It'll figure you out. That's what it does."

The strands flowed up his neck, over his temples, onto his face. They dragged his consciousness away from the world around him, to somewhere else.

He was in a strange, empty place, a white room too wide to see the edges and too bright for his eyes in this form. A Skrull stood with their back to him. This wasn't, he told himself firmly, real. This place was not real. That person was not the person she looked like. Because it only took him a moment, even after years apart and so short a reunion, to recognize Soren. From behind, from a distance, at the end of all the worlds, he'd know her.

This Kree thing had dressed itself as her, but not as the wary, sun-starved Soren he'd seen in Mar-Vel's lab. No, this was Soren as she'd been when they'd met, the defiant refugee who would not leave her makeshift home, even while the Kree assault force streaked down through atmosphere. When Talos had led in the team he'd brought to provide cover during the evacuation, she'd stood in his path, with her work-roughened hands on her hips and her narrow shoulders squared, her delicate ears quivering with rage and determination. She'd said, "This place is ours. Help us defend it." And by all that was holy, they had, that day at least. The Kree supreme intelligence had even pulled Soren's old clothes from Talos's memory, the vest with half the armor plating melted, the pants that...

Damn. It'd been a long six years, and this creature had no business rooting through his mind to create this illusion. Skrulls just imitated the outside of people, stuff they showed to everyone around them every day. The Kree would, of course, take something personal that nobody had offered. They always wanted what they had no right to. But if this Kree intelligence already found Soren, what else had it discovered? Not two minutes into this interrogation, and he'd failed to protect her identity.

"Who do you think you're fooling with that disguise?" Talos asked the person before him, who was not Soren. "You're talking to a master, here. I know a fake when I see one."

When she turned she made the relieved-welcoming, nearly subaudible rumble in her throat that Soren had made when she'd seen Talos in Mar-Vel's lab. Mentally, he clamped down on the instinct to return the sound and go to her. This Kree trickery had drawn Soren's form from his mind. These were his memories it was toying with. He had to find a way to stop this. Maybe staying angry at it would help. He hoped so, because he couldn't do anything else.

"I have to appear as someone," the supreme intelligence said in a sing-song mockery of Soren's gentle voice. "But we're not here to talk about me."

He looked for exits to this empty place. There were none. "Well, don't let me stop you."

The supreme intelligence smiled Soren's 'I don't want to admit that you're funny, but you are' smile, and it physically hurt, how much Talos missed the real thing. "General Talos. We've been looking for you for years now. You've been so careful in the past. This person I look like was on Mar-Vel's ship, too. I see you have a strong reaction to her. Was she the reason you turned yourself in?"

"Of course she was. No shame in that." There hadn't been when he'd made that choice, anyway. Now, though... Neither of them wanted him to trade all that he knew about Skrull operations for her. He should've been dead by now. Soren would've been proud of his sacrifice. Surely the Kree technology making this possible wasn't designed to work on Skrulls. There must've been some way to overload it, or crash it, or something.

"Who is she?"

What was the Kree intelligence stuck on Soren for? She didn't deserve this. "You destroyed her home multiple times and followed her halfway across the universe, you slapped her face on whatever face you had before I came in here, and you don't even know her name. That's just sad. She's no one." Not to the Kree, at least, and Talos meant to keep it that way. "Forget about her. You've got me, now. The big prize." He forced himself to grin. Though he'd need a mirror to be sure, he thought it came out well.

"Where are the Skrulls on Earth?" the intelligence demanded.

Talos didn't have to fake his bitter laugh. "There aren't any. They're all dead but me." He'd been so afraid that the Kree intelligence would drag his secrets right out of his skull. But if it had to ask questions and wait for his answers, oh, he had so many answers, and none of them true.

"Except for the Skrulls in Mar-Vel's ship, in orbit," the intelligence said. "Where are they going?"

Fortunately, Talos had no idea where Carol was taking them. "Oh, here, I'll picture it for you in my mind. You can suss it out from there, can't you?"

He made a show of closing his eyes and pressing his hands together to concentrate. His mind unhelpfully reminded him that this illusory Soren would be the last glimpse of her he had, now. But this was a technique he'd learned along with his people's prayers. Focusing on the black hole in the center of the Skrulls' home galaxy, the eternal blackness, the boundless depths, he quieted his mind and everything else. The blackness was peace. And behind it, the Beyond.

"This doesn't work that way." Soren's voice was impatient. It wasn't really her voice, and also, it was.

Talos ignored it. This was the longest the Kree had left him awake without dosing him with their paralysis drugs. If he concentrated hard enough now, he might be able to change. The shift was coming. Talos welcomed it. He was ready. He would take the Skrull secrets with him to the Beyond, as he unraveled into the nothingness at the center of all...

He was on his knees in the small room, where the silvery blue lines had climbed up him from the floor. The shock left him gasping for breath. The room felt somewhat larger now, thanks to a massive hole in one wall. Carol stood there, her photon powers shimmering around her and her eyes blazing like fire.

"What are you doing here?" Talos asked in complete astonishment.

"That's what I just asked," the Kree commander growled.

Carol smiled at Talos. His brain was coming back from that deep nothing he'd looked into. Or was still looking into. Could he still be in the intelligence construct's empty room, somehow?

Carol turned to the Kree commander and her bright smile fell away. "I know you had no problem leaving me with the Skrulls, but we humans don't leave our friends behind." She picked up a weapon from one of the fallen Kree with one hand and hauled Talos to his feet with the other, pulling him out of the blue ring of grasping light before the strands enveloped him again. When she shoved the weapon into Talos's hands, he aimed at the Kree commander. The yellow-eyed one was the last Kree left standing. The rest of them sprawled across the hallway, unconscious or dead.

"Give me a minute?" Carol asked Talos. "I have to commune with the Supreme Intelligence real quick. Then we'll go."

"Fine by me," he said. She'd spent years thinking she was Kree. Maybe the intelligence did something for her that it wouldn't do for an outsider like him.

Finer still, the gun she'd handed him had enough of her DNA on it to affect a perfectly exact replication. While she stood in the blue circle and let the strands wrap around her, Talos shifted, with almost his usual, glorious ease, into Carol's form. He didn't even lower the gun he held on the Kree commander.

"Ugh, that's disgusting," the Kree commander complained.

Talos winked at him and aligned the gun more directly with his face. "While she's busy, you can pretend I'm her. I don't have flashy photon hands, but this will kill you just as dead." How did Carol keep all her hair out of her face? That must've been one of her superpowers. It felt so _good_ to have this particular kind of problem again.

In the blue circle, Carol's hands began to glow. Alarms blared, though they weren't loud enough to wake all the Kree soldiers she'd already defeated. The Kree commander took a step toward her, reaching for her arm, and Talos dipped the gun's muzzle a bit before he pulled the trigger. The shot slammed into the commander's shoulder, sending him stumbling away from Carol. "That was a warning," Talos said in Carol's cheerful voice. "Next one goes up your ugly nose." The Kree commander scowled, proving that he was just as vain as Talos had expected he'd be.

A small device popped off Carol's neck and clattered onto the floor. Talos wished he could look away from the Kree commander to examine it. He'd replicated the device's appearance when he'd copied Carol's shape, but if he'd known what it did, he could've made a more accurate copy. The Kree commander stared at it, looking distinctly worried. 

"Oh, was that her award for good Kree behavior?" Talos asked. 

"It's not a laughing matter." The commander clutched his bad shoulder and glared at the device on the floor. "You have no idea how much energy that thing was containing."

The blue strands fell away from Carol. "It wasn't 'containing' my power. It was holding me back." When she turned around, she did a double take at Talos, who, except for the missing device on her neck, looked identical to her. "Whoa. Okay. That's really weird."

Talos released the gun with one hand, then the other, while he pulled Carol's smaller arms free of the bindings, then resumed his natural form. Now that this shape was his choice, his skin was much more comfortable to inhabit. "Sorry, had to try it. It's been a rough day."

The alarms were still going, and now people were running around in the hallway that Carol had blasted through to come here. "We need to go. Right now. Yon-Rogg, if you follow me, you'll regret it."

"I often do." The commander's hint of humor suggested that he and Carol knew each other well. It was probably best that Talos hadn't imitated her for longer.

Talos hated to leave an enemy alive at his back, but if anybody deserved a kill shot at that Kree, Carol did, and she didn't want to take it. Talos gave her a step's head start and followed. She knew her way to the escape pods. It was lucky Talos didn't have to find the way himself, because he was almost out of his mind with relief.

He hadn't betrayed a single one of his people's secrets, and he was still alive. If he ever saw his analysts in their hidden bases again, they'd have a lot to discuss. And one way or another, Talos was going back to Soren. They'd find a new place they could call home.


End file.
